


in too deep

by contagiousiridescence



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Lena POV, Lena is a marine biologist and damn good at her job, Some angst, alternate universe-- still have powers, don't @ me I don't know anything about marine biology, lena is a thirsty ho, mermaid au, slowish burn, so much pining i could make a christmas candle, there will eventually be a rating change to mature
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2019-11-18 20:30:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18126116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contagiousiridescence/pseuds/contagiousiridescence
Summary: Lena Luthor has crossed the country in hopes to fix the destruction her brother left behind in his search for mythical sea creatures. Not many at this new marine center but her old college friend Sam Arias give her more than a disdainful look, but she finds herself quickly becoming friends with a cheerful woman that frequents the center. At the same time, Lena struggles to right the wrongs of her family-- but what started as a determined journey to do better suddenly up-ends Lena's entire world when she comes face to face with the object of Lex's obsessions.In short, Lena Luthor discovers a mermaid, new friends, and an ocean of treacherous possibilities.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *throws confetti*  
> welcome. hope y'all like gays and mermaids and lots of scientific jargon I don't really understand.

Sunlight catches like a silver bullet against the sleek frame of a Volvo as it cruises down I-5. A lone figure operates the car, a pair of Raybans flashing under the glare of the sun. She doesn’t play any music and her windows are sealed, but the farther down the coast her car travels, the less prominent the frown that tucks at the corners of her mouth.  It isn’t until the shore peeks out from behind a hill that the woman finally lowers her glasses to watch the sprawl of sea and sand.

She thinks it’s immeasurably beautiful and compares nothing to what she witnessed throughout the entire road trip across the eleven-or-so states it took to get here, and for the first time since leaving Nevada that morning, she breathes a heavy sigh of relief.

Lena crests the top of the hill and pauses just long enough at the yield sign to truly appreciate the glint of the California sunlight over the bay stretched out far and wide ahead of her. It glitters and sparkles like a sea of sun-soaked rhinestones, and she nearly forgets to push the gas pedal before the car behind her lays on a short, insistent _beep beep_. She resists the urge to scowl at them through her mirror and continues down the hill toward the harbor.

Lena isn’t used to California. It’s warm and bright and languid, very much unlike the cold, impersonal city of Metropolis. It was a place she’d simply considered in passing day dreams, if only because her family had its roots planted firmly in the dark cobblestones of New York, and it was always assumed those roots would tie her there, too. She’s visited before, of course. Family vacations and all that, filled with exclusive resorts and splendor far beyond the average Californian’s beach day when she was young and carefree and ignorant. It’s different this time. Now, Lena is here, dragging the remnants of her brother’s research in a seventy-thousand dollar car and dusty cardboard boxes that fill the interior until the vehicle is nearly bursting.

It’s supposed to be home.

She parks her car in a lot on the other side of the research facility’s dock and sits a moment, staring out at the water. It’s supposed to be home, but it still feels like a far-fetched fantasy, like at any minute someone was going to snatch away the veil of twinkling waves and sunlight to reveal the backdrop of Metropolis looming over her head, ready to drench her in a shadow she’ll never escape from. Lena suppresses a shiver and grips her steering wheel a little tighter until the thought of her hometown no longer prickles on the back of her neck.

A few deep breaths later, Lena is standing in the lobby of the facility, craning her head up to analyze the sperm whale skeleton they have suspended high above the visitors. It’s not real, of course, and they’re missing the pelvic bones, though Lena supposes that’s not a big deal considering sperm whales don’t have pelvic girdles, anyway, so it’s hardly an affront. She looks instead to the diagrams of sea turtles along the walls, then to the interactive audio display about dolphin pods, and the mural of jellyfish that spans the entire eastern wing. Then finally her gaze comes to rest on the giant block of letters above the Information Desk that reads _National City Institute of Marine Biology Research._

“Lena!”

She whips around to see a tall, willowy-limbed woman marching eagerly in her direction, the dark walnut of her hair rippling backward at the force of her stride. A matching smile springs up to Lena’s own face, radiating relief.

“Sam!” They meet in the center of the lobby, and Sam throws her arms around Lena’s shoulders to bring her in for a tight hug, while Lena politely closes her own around Sam’s backside in a gentle squeeze. There’s the distinct, sour smell of sea water, iced fish, and kelp coming from Sam’s clothes, but Lena finds more comfort in it than anything else.

“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show,” Sam says, retracting just enough to hold Lena by the arms and gaze at her fully. “My director kept giving me these looks--”

Lena interrupts with a short laugh. “Alexandra Danvers has something coming if she thinks I can be scared away from this opportunity by idle threats alone,” she says, lifting an eyebrow for emphasis.

Sam grins. “That’s my girl.” She gives Lena one more quick hug, and keeps her arm around Lena’s shoulders as she leads them back toward the staff-only wing. She explains a few of the facilities as they make their way toward the far side of the building, where Lena assumes Director Danvers is impatiently waiting for her arrival. It’s a thought that burrows deep into her gut and stays there like a lead weight. When they enter a large room in the back that is partly open to the ocean beyond, the weight sinks deeper. Lena sees a dock lead out from the room and several researchers kneeling over the edge to collect samples, but one of them is standing, arms folded securely over her chest.

Alex Danvers.

“Miss Luthor,” comes a sharp, even voice, the one that Lena has listened to countless times over the telephone. It’s not unfriendly, but she doesn’t miss the edge to it-- the one that still bleeds with suspicion in Lena’s ears. It’s even more noticeable in person.

“Director Danvers,” Lena greets in kind, hoping she sounds more cordial. Alex Danvers looks younger than Lena thought-- of course, Lena’s read all about the Institute and who runs it, even if the switch in Directors was fairly recent. Lena knows Alex is only a few years older than she is, but the lines in her face and the straightness of her spine make it feel more like a century. She thinks its the authority that Alex wields, combined with the experience that thrums in her blood from the pedigree of famous biologists the Danvers were known for producing.

It would be intimidating if Lena wasn’t also from a similar bloodline. Only hers is famous for the mass destruction of sea life in favor of oil subsidies, so the hooded looks she gets from the surrounding technicians only serves to emphasize the disparity between her and the Danvers.

The Director advances at a slow, calm pace. Sam stays beside Lena and smiles, and for a brief moment, it appears as though Alex returns it. “So, you came after all,” Alex says, and the smile disappears when her attention refocuses on Lena. It’s not an accusation, Lena doesn’t think, though it sounds faintly curious.

“I did,” Lena answers. “I said I would. I’m not the type to go back on my word.”

Alex makes a small noise that she can’t tell is agreement or incredulity. Lena doesn’t blame her, considering that was all the Luthors have been known for over the past decade anyway, but the sound of it sticks in the back of her head like a black mark of suspicion. “Great. I’m sure Sam has already given you a tour, yes?” It’s confirmed with a small nod, so she continues, “We’ll have a space cleared for you in the laboratory. Follow me.”

Lena trails after the Director, Sam in tow, as Alex shows her to the research laboratory. Several other technicians and marine chemists are already there, pouring over samples or entering data into their laptops from old rolling chairs. Tanks of various sizes and other equipment line the tables and counter tops, and Lena takes the chance to admire it all before Alex stops them in front of a small, open space on the far side of the room.

“Here,” Alex says. “You can place whatever you need in this area.” It’s another cleared spot, but not much, and Lena can tell that cramming all of her brother’s research in such little shelf space was going to be a struggle. That might have been intentional, she thinks mildly, though the thought doesn’t linger.

Still, she takes it in stride. “Thank you, Director Danvers. I’ll have everything unloaded shortly.” There’s no additional equipment for her to use beyond the empty tanks in her corner, it appears. She has her own laptop, but as she studies her allocated work station, she decides she’ll have to use some of Lex’s old tools. Everything she used before is still back in Metropolis, likely rotting in a box cast aside by her previous research center. It’s as fresh of a start as she’ll get.

Sam eventually departs for her own station while Lena unpacks her car. No one offers to help, but she doesn’t complain, and she manages to get each box stacked up beside her part of the counter by the time Director Danvers comes to check in.

“As promised,” Lena says, and Alex lifts a box lid to peer in at the various folders. It’s full of papers and thumb drives, some of which are useless, but others-- the ones that Alex Danvers had rested Lena’s entire marine career on-- capture the Director’s attention immediately. She closes the box and fixes Lena with a hard stare.

“Thank you,” is all Lena gets, before Alex has a few helpers grab the boxes and hoist them somewhere else.

\---

It doesn’t make national news that Lena stole Lex’s research from the Luthor Marine Center-- not that it would, considering the contents would have put the Center under billions worth more of lawsuits-- but she feels it just as deeply when her phone vibrates non-stop for the rest of the week. She knows, objectively, that it would be a better idea to ditch it and get herself a new one, if only for the peace that would come with getting a full night’s rest. Or at the very least, to turn the damn ringer off.

But there’s a small part of her that thrills at every time she sees her mother’s name light up on her screen, the letters angry and bold as they stare up from Lena’s phone. She imagines Lillian is losing her mind over it all and the thought sends a small twinge of comfort through the empty chasm cracked open within her chest. The dread that had clung to her throughout the drive still lingers like a chronic disease, only temporarily debilitating when she’s had one scotch too many alone in her room at two in the morning, but it’s manageable now that there are three thousand miles between her and her family. It recedes behind a cloak of hazy unfeeling, and she operates much the same while at the lab; carefully blank and ignorant of everything but the task in front of her.

\---

“Hey, Lena?”

She looks up from her microscope to see Sam leaning over the table, watching. It’s not unusual for Sam stop by for a quick chat or to check to see how Lena’s doing, especially since she’s surrounded by a surplus of researchers who most certainly aren’t happy to have her there working among them. There’s been more than one occasion where the other technicians covered their work when she came too close, like children hoping to prevent straying eyes during an academic exam, or even barred her access to something they were involved with as if she might tamper with their specimens. And it had nothing to do with her stealing Lex’s research-- if anything, that should have made them feel _better_ , but Lena isn’t even sure if Alex cared enough to tell them. She wasn’t interested in pleading for their favor anyway. Lena wasn’t there to make friends; she already has Sam.

“Something wrong?” Lena removes her eyewear and places it down on her station beside a collection of various glass tubes. A program on her laptop is in the middle of analyzing a sample she’d pulled from a tide pool this morning, but it’ll be a while before it’s complete, so Lena doesn’t mind the interruption. She peels off the blue nitrile gloves and tosses them onto the counter beside her things as Sam leans against the table.

“Nah. I was hoping I could get your help on something, though,” Sam explains, gesturing briefly over her shoulder with a thumb toward her side of the facility. “You were always better at this stuff than I was.”

Lena snorts. “Entirely untrue. There’s a reason you’re a certified zoologist and I am not.”

“Certified smertified. I need your brain, so _get_.”

Lena shakes her head, but follows after Sam. They arrive in a different area of the facility after crossing through a few immaculate hallways; this one also has an outlet to the ocean, but there are a lot more animals in this section than her own. She watches a few tanks of injured wildlife as they maneuver around veterinarians and other zoologists. Some of the creatures are outside of their tanks; she sees a young sea lion sedated nearby as a blue glove probes into its mouth, and a different table they pass has an otter stretched out for an ultrasound. The chatter of all the people blends into the gentle lull of waves lapping against the edge of larger aquariums.  It seems busy, but Lena never worked much with the animals directly, so she’s unsure if the level of activity is unusual.

Sam leads her to a small med tank. An assistant is already there, fussing over a juvenile sea turtle that doesn’t do much else in the water but float. Lena can tell it’s sick because of the cauliflower-esque skin tumor growing around its jaw, and something within her withers at the sight.

“Oh no,” she murmurs, and Sam nods. “What’s the percentage now?”

“We’re estimating at twenty-nine percent,” Sam says in a quiet voice. When Lena looks to her, she can see the emotion gleaming along the edges of Sam’s eyes at the admission. “At least forty-six percent of the nesting females are testing positive now, even when they’re asymptomatic.”

She feels her throat grow taut with heat, and it takes her a moment to swallow back the hardness that forms on the back of her tongue at the sudden thought of her brother. The assistant must have been along the same wavelength, because he meets her gaze in that moment and glowers.

“What can I do?” she asks Sam, and her friend rummages through some equipment before handing her a small case of tissue slides. It’s marked with the specimen’s number, and Lena assumes Sam means to have her test it.

“It’s the same virus,” Sam says, “that much we know for sure. But we still can’t figure out what’s spreading it. Turtle leeches aren’t capable of infecting this wide of a population to such a degree and so quickly-- it _has_ to be something else. You’re not finding anything in the water?”

Lena shakes her head. “No. The samples all come back clean.”

Sam bites her lip, brow pinched. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Lena agrees, and she folds her arms across herself as she watches the turtle shy away from the assistant. “But… maybe it’s something deeper. The food sources have been analyzed, and so have the waters, but has anyone tracked these turtles to see how far they’re going?”

“You want to release them back into the sea?” the assistant pipes up, appalled. Lena simply frowns at him.

“I wouldn’t jeopardize their health,” she tells him, and then looks to Sam. “But there are asymptomatic carriers and non-infected turtles, correct? You can't quarantine all of them. If you can get trackers on them and map out the locations they visit, we could sample the environments and cross-reference with any pollutants or other unknowns. I know we have a basic migratory pattern for them, but there must be some place they’re going that’s causing them to get infected.”

Sam looks thoughtful. “I’ll have to check with Alex on that one,” she says, and then beckons Lena closer to the turtle. The assistant doesn’t move, but it doesn’t escape Lena’s notice when he leans away from her. “But honestly, that’s only part of the reason I wanted to pick your brain. Something else showed up on this guy that we haven’t seen before.”

Before Lena can ask, Sam pulls on a glove and carefully lifts the front flipper of the turtle to reveal a small, black mark nestled in its armpit. At first it looks like a pigment marking, but when Lena stoops low to examine more closely, she makes out what appears to be a tattoo.

“Did someone do this?” she asks, and part of her isn’t sure whether to be relieved or worried that she doesn’t recognize the symbol that the marking makes. It’s a five-sided diamond shape with what appears to be a jagged ‘S’ curved through the middle, and it’s no larger than the pad of her pinky finger.

“Honestly, that’s my guess,” Sam says, frowning. “But I took a tissue sample, and it doesn’t register as any ink compound I know of, and the symbol doesn’t match any other medical center’s tagging system. No injury, either, since it doesn’t look to be scar tissue, like from a brand.”

“When’d you pick him up?”

“Yesterday morning. A student actually saw him bobbing around by the harbor docks and reported it. I didn’t make the initial report, but there wasn’t anything about this mark at his intake exam.”

Lena blinks at the little mark in wonder. “That’s… interesting.”

“That’s what I said.” Sam moves closer to Lena and drops her voice. The assistant doesn’t make a move to intercept whatever it is Sam’s about to tell her, though Lena can tell the secrecy puts him on edge from the narrowing of his stare. “The tissue sample I gave you-- that was pulled earlier today, after I saw the mark. There’s… there’s no virus. And he tested positive _yesterday_.”

At first Lena doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink. She just stares at the funny shaped marking with the words _“there’s no virus”_ repeating like a broken record in her head. It doesn’t make sense-- how could a turtle infected with Fibropapillomatosis suddenly be free of the virus? That wasn’t how viruses worked. At least, not all of them, but certainly not this one-- he already had the skin tumors and everything. She opens her mouth to question it, and then closes it again.

“Oh! Sam!”

The two of them look up from the turtle, and Lena zeros in on a leanly-built woman standing on the other side of a dolphin tank. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a neat pony, and a pair of dark-framed glasses are perched on her nose. The easy smile she directs at Sam is bright and crinkles the edges of her eyes just enough to be genuine.

Sam straightens up from where she’s bent over to whisper with Lena and waves at the woman. “Hey, Kara! What’s the article for today?” she returns, and slowly Lena pulls herself upright to watch as the woman-- Kara-- navigates around the equipment and medical tanks before planting herself right in front of Sam. She doesn’t look like a scientist; she’s wearing a button-up pinstripe shirt with crisp sleeves rolled up to her elbows and the collar unbuttoned. The pants she wears are tight and maroon and definitely not fit for marine research.

“Still going over the details for Alex’s interview,” she responds. Her voice is bright, much like the wide, earnest shine to her eyes when she turns to address Lena. Now that she’s closer, Lena notices the eyes behind the glasses are an impeccable shade of blue. It reminds her of the sparkling shores of California that had enchanted her on the drive to the Institute. They widen slightly when Lena meets her gaze, and for the briefest of moments, the woman looks almost pleasantly surprised. “Hi! You look new. I’m Kara.”

Perhaps it’s just a reflex, but Lena offers out a hand immediately at the introduction and grips her with a firm pump when Kara takes it.  Her hand is warm and smooth, though Lena notices faint callusing on her fingertips when they slide against Lena’s palm.

“Lena,” is all she offers, before glancing at Sam.

Thankfully, Sam doesn’t jump in to offer any more details-- such as specific details about the rest of her name that Lena would prefer not to tarnish a first impression with-- but instead smiles and pats Lena on the shoulder with affection.

“I went to college with Lena,” Sam explains, “We got our Masters in Marine Sciences together.”

Kara’s smile grows even more brilliant, somehow. “That’s amazing! Are you from Metropolis, too? I know that’s where we picked up this brainiac,” she says, nudging Sam with her elbow in a playful jab. The interaction is almost sisterly, so Lena assumes they’ve been friendly for quite a while.

“Yes,” Lena answers carefully, praying that the next question doesn’t delve any deeper. “I just moved here.”

“Oh, great! You’ll love it. National City is incredible,” Kara says, beaming, and it’s with such sunny enthusiasm that Lena feels the warmth under her skin at the sound. It’s a very peculiar feeling that leaves her slightly mystified, especially when that warmth blossoms down her spine the longer Kara watches her. “It has the _best_ food. Hey! If you want, I can show you around sometime.”

The offer catches her so far off guard that all Lena does is blink and stare. She’s said, what, a total of five words to this girl, and she’s suggesting they… socialize? Outside of the Institute? Lena’s not used to being caught unawares, and certainly not by random women that flash her such bright, jovial smiles. She only barely registers the brief squeeze of Sam’s grip on her arm when the lack of an answer creeps too close to awkward silence.

“Oh,” Lena manages, and a split moment later she composes herself back into the polite, professional facade she’s learned to erect at every imaginable interaction she has with unfamiliar individuals. It’s a force of habit, bordering on instinct that she doesn’t even notice until the cooling of her expression is reflected in the flattened edge of her tone. “That is… thank you. I appreciate the offer. Perhaps sometime I’ll take you up on that.”

If Kara realizes it’s an empty promise, she doesn’t show it beyond the gentle reassurance her thousand-watt smile softens to. “Sure. Sam has my number, if you want it. I gotta split, though-- deadlines and all that, you know. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime?”

Lena finds it somewhat easier to smile back at Kara, now that the shock of the woman’s overt friendliness has abated a little. And by a little she means hardly, because her stomach is still twisted up and lining her insides with knots of apprehension over this stranger that so suddenly and so boldly inserted herself into Lena’s awareness, as if it’s routine to casually befriend the daughter of a multi-billion empire intent on destroying the natural world. She prays that Kara never learns of that secret, if it means she’ll continue to look at Lena like she’s as refreshing as spring rain.

“Maybe you will. I haven’t been fired yet, so I take that to mean I’ll be around a while longer,” she responds, to which Sam snorts and knocks an arm against Lena’s side.

Kara’s laughter rings like bells. No, not bells-- the sounds conjures an old memory of  wooden windchimes streamed in sunshine and brushed by a soft summer breeze. “Let’s hope so,” she says, and then she’s departing after a quick hug to Sam before Lena loses track of her altogether among the bustle of staff and animals.

Lena doesn’t really know what to make of it all, other than that she feels strangely disappointed. She watches the direction Kara disappeared in before giving her head a small shake and turning back to Sam. There was still the issue of the mysteriously cured sea turtle to be discussed, and she wasn’t about to let herself get distracted.

Well, more distracted.

“So--” she starts, just for Sam to shove her phone into Lena’s face.

“I definitely do have her number,” Sam declares, and Lena assumes that the sequence on the screen that blurs from its proximity to her eyeballs must be Kara’s phone number.

Lena swats Sam’s phone away and fixes her with a glare. “That is not what I was going to ask you for,” she says, huffing slightly at the heat crawling up the back of her neck from the mere implication that she might be interested in Kara’s offer. Or at least, desperate enough to ask for her contact information fifteen seconds after the woman walked away.

Sam shrugs and pockets the phone, but the doesn’t lose the slight note of smugness as she counters, “Well I’m going to send it to you anyway. Do with it what you want.”

Lena rolls her eyes. “Just give me the slides. I’ll run some diagnostics. Maybe take some more samples later today,” she suggests, before glancing down at the turtle again and frowning at it. “Or tomorrow, so it has a chance to rest. Do you have any from yesterday?”

“I’ll grab them for you. Let me know if you find anything,” Sam says, and together they watch the turtle float listlessly in the water as the assistant tries another attempt at feeding it. A spike of heartache digs into Lena’s chest at the sight; all she can picture is the headline of the newspaper, “LUTHOR ACCUSED OF OFFSHORE TOXIC WASTE DUMPING; ATLANTIC SEA LIFE AT RISK” in harsh, bold typeface, like it’s been tattooed behind her eyelids.

From under the pain, a flare of peppery anger ignites somewhere deep in her gut. She grips the slides in her hand and wordlessly excuses herself from the medical facility, the heels of her boots clicking in a hard, determined beat over the grated floor. No one looks up at her as she strides into her laboratory, nor when she spends the next four hours studying tissue slides and analyzing serums and blood samples she’d hounded from Sam, and no one cares when she stays late into the night pouring over her microscope.

She gets back to her hotel room sometime after one in the morning, and she rises four hours later with the same fire still burning a hole through her chest.

\--

“No.”

The flex of her jaw is painful, like her teeth might break under the pressure of the muscle that strains as Lena glares at Alex. The Director is leaning back against her desk, and the two of them are closed off from the rest of the facility as Alex stares down Lena in the dark of her office like she’d just refused a child her favorite toy.

The comparison rankles the edges of Lena’s demeanor. She hadn’t come three thousand miles to be subjected to the same condescending attitude, to be patronized, and to be road blocked at every turn when she was just trying to _help_. Alex must see this, because the hard slant of her gaze softens slightly and she unwinds her arms just enough to appear less authoritative.

“Look, Lena,” she says, and the way she says her name, like she’s trying to be kind-- maybe even friendly-- stops some of Lena’s boiling frustration from bubbling over the edge. “I’m not saying this because I don’t trust you.”

It takes a sudden surge of will power not to bite out a dark retort, so Lena swallows back the bitter taste the words leave on her tongue and remarks dryly, “You just don’t trust my family.”

Alex meets her stare again. Her eyes are dark and piercing, but they aren’t swimming with resentment like Lena’s used to. “It’s true. I don’t,” Alex answers, and then she takes a deep breath. “I don’t-- I’m not doubting your intentions. Lex’s files are an incredible asset in our search for a cure, and I will always be grateful that you risked everything to bring them here. But I can’t allow the younger sibling of the man who effectively poisoned the Atlantic coastline in his search for a mythical sea creature to assist on this project. It could jeopardize our funding, even our staff-- you just _being_ here nearly cost me a good portion of my crew.”

“So let me do so behind the scenes,” Lena finds herself arguing, in a voice that sounds slightly thicker than she meant, “You don’t need to tell anyone where the data comes from. Hell, tell them Sam gave it to you. She’ll cover me.”

Alex frowns at her. “Of that, I have no doubt. But I’m sorry Lena. This is the way it has to be, until we can at least take care of the immediate problem. You cannot be part of this project in any capacity.”

Lena already has her lips parted to insist, but in that moment the door to Alex’s office swings inward and she whips around to see a young woman in mid-step before their eyes meet.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” the woman says, and Lena remembers her as Sam’s friend Kara from the previous week. She hadn’t seen Kara since then, and had nearly forgotten about her in pursuit of the cure. Now that she’s standing there, blinking from Lena to Alex, Lena wonders how she ever forgot Kara existed at all. “Is everything alright?”

“It’s fine, Kara,” Alex says immediately, and Lena notices that the Director is tense again-- nearly radiating it. “We were just finishing.” The finality of the statement sinks low into Lena’s skin and she grits her teeth again, but manages not to direct her scowl at Kara. Instead she hopes that Alex can feel the anger seething through the hard look she sends her way before Lena nods and brushes past Kara for the door.

A warm hand falls onto her upper arm, and Lena halts.

“Hey, Lena,” Kara says, and the greeting is effused with gentle warmth. It’s friendly, even, and the sound of her name sends a flash of heat under her skin where Kara’s hand is still resting on her arm. “It’s good to see you. My offer still stands for a tour of the city, by the way.”

For whatever reason, Lena glances over her shoulder at Alex brooding in her office, but the blank expression over the Director’s face is almost unnerving by how unreadable it is. When she looks back to Kara, the young woman adjusts the glasses on her nose and smiles. Lena isn’t certain how to respond-- especially when Sam isn’t there to be her social anchor-- but from somewhere in herself, she finds a tether to keep grounded from the storm brewing in her thoughts.

“Thank you, Kara,” Lena says, hoping she doesn’t sound as stiff as she feels. And then before she can stop herself, the words fall freely and with a surprising level of confidence as she adds, “I could actually use a coffee. Know of any place decent close by?”

It’s like watching a firework light up across the sky; that’s how the excitement Kara exudes looks to Lena, who had no idea the concept of coffee could be so exhilarating. “Yes! I have a favorite cafe called Noonan’s that’s only a five minute drive from here,” Kara says, and those blue eyes bore into Lena with such unreserved attention that she almost wonders if this was a terrible mistake. It’s bizarre, being so closely acknowledged when she’s spent the last week entirely ignored. It isn’t a predatory gaze, but it’s intense to the same degree. “Just give me a minute with Alex and I’ll meet you outside.”

Lena gestures toward Alex, still sitting silently in her office during the exchange, and leaves the two of them there as she makes her way back to her lab. It’s a strangely dreamlike feeling; part of her almost insists the entire conversation was a delirious fantasy brought on by the little sleep she’s managed to catch over the last few days. Then there’s the curious little spark of _something_ resting just beneath that thought that burrows deeper into her stomach until she realizes with a startled blink that she’s nervous.

Why the hell she would be nervous about a cup of coffee is entirely unknown to her. Trying not to scowl, Lena cleans up her station and grabs for the purse she’d stashed in her cubby. The thought of asking Sam to accompany her is tempting, and for a moment she stands there, seriously contemplating the idea of dragging Sam to the cafe with them-- but when she turns to finally make for the medical facility, she nearly smacks right into Kara’s chest.

“Oh! Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Kara says, when Lena lurches backward in surprise. She glances at the purse in Lena’s hands and smiles. There’s something about that smile that Lena finds off-putting; it’s easy, sincere, and makes her stomach twist at the sight. Perhaps off-putting was the wrong way to describe it, but Lena’s insides are still strangely reactive when Kara’s gaze flickers back up to her face. “Ready to go? If it’s cool with you, I figured I should drive. Show you the way and all that.”

“That’s-- I-- yes, that’s fine,” Lena says, before clearing her throat and giving a decisive nod. She waves toward the door, and Kara heads for it, Lena following after with the feeling of anxiety still rolling hot embers around in her stomach. She almost chalks it up to the after affects of her discussion with Alex, but when she finds herself at the passenger door of Kara’s little beat-up hatchback Subaru, Lena realizes it’s something else entirely.

Kara smiles at her from over the top of her car. “Give me a sec, I just gotta unlock it from the inside. The key fob died a while back,” she says, before pulling open her door and ducking into the car. Lena watches her through the window as Kara leans over the seat and pulls the inner handle until the passenger door pops open. The anxiety she feels is immediately stoppered by genuine curiosity; she’s fairly certain she’s never been inside a car as old and worn as this one, especially one with a rear door a few shades of darker red than the rest of the car that she suspects is a replacement. The inside is all cloth; when she slides onto the seat, Lena can feel how stiff and threadbare the fabric is, as if it’d been manufactured over twenty years ago.

Which it might have been, considering Lena was pretty sure this model of car came out in ‘94.

“Sorry, my car isn’t super impressive,” Kara laughs, and Lena assumes some of her skepticism must’ve escaped in her expression from the crinkled smile of amusement Kara shoots at her. “But she gets the job done, and I don’t have to worry about ruining the interior when it’s already jacked up.” Kara pats the cracked dashboard with affection, and for whatever reason, the remnants of Lena’s anxiousness dissolve into the stale air of the car.

“Do you have… a dog?” Lena ventures, glancing furtively into the back seat, which is stained in various spots a deep brown among the dusty tan of the cloth. There’s papers and boots and random objects scattered from the seat to the floor, some of which she thinks is actually discarded garbage.

Kara pushes on the frame of her glasses and chuckles. “No. Not yet. Looks like it though, right?” She inserts the key and the car coughs to life, rumbling much louder than Lena’s Volvo as Kara switches it into reverse. “I like being outdoors a lot, so I can be a bit of a mess sometimes.”

Lena looks pointedly at the dark slacks Kara has on and the slim leather belt that holds them in place to the nicely ironed blouse that cuffs at her wrists. She looks nice-- fashionable, even, if Lena had to pick a more appropriate term. Clean and proper and not a speck of dirt anywhere Lena can see. “You don’t look like much of a mess to me,” Lena comments idly, to which Kara laughs.

“Hey! I said sometimes, not all the time.”

\---

Noonan’s is an older establishment, but it’s lived through some decent interior upgrades that aren’t entirely apparent from the outside. When Kara had first pulled up, Lena thought it was some sort of diner or even a downtrodden bar-- but inside, as Kara escorted her to a booth in the back, she was delighted to find that the entire backside of the cafe had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay.

“It’s my favorite spot,” Kara confesses, as Lena admires the art hanging on the other walls beyond the bar. “I actually worked here for a few years as a waitress.”

Lena blinks and closes her fingers around her mug of coffee, which an older woman had just brought to her. It’s black and boring, and a far contrast to the ‘pumpkin spice latte with extra foam, sprinkled with cinnamon’ that Kara has her hands fastened around. “Really?” Lena asks, tone colored by her surprise. “You don’t seem like the waitressing type.”

Kara flashes her a grin. “Well, I’m not anymore. That was back in 2012, 2013.”

“I see.” Lena takes a sip of her coffee, and has to hold back a hum of pleasure when it tastes much better than she was expecting. She knows Kara is involved somehow with the Institute-- how could she not be, appearing so randomly in the employee-only sections of the facility like she lived here?-- but Lena isn’t certain in what capacity, or why. Part of her almost cautions against asking, but a moment later she finds herself inquiring anyway, “So, what do you do now? Do you work for the Institute?”

“Not officially,” Kara answers, and she does that wrinkled-nose smile again that makes Lena swallow back a mouthful of hot coffee faster than she meant to. “I’m an investigative journalist, actually, but I concentrate on ecological crises and bringing attention to discoveries that impact the environment.”

If Lena was any more uncouth, she might have spat out the coffee right onto the table for the abrupt and rather jarring shock that jolts through her. Instead she simply freezes, hand suspended over her mug and gaze pinned onto the napkin by Kara’s elbow.

Kara doesn’t seem to notice, for she continues, “But a lot of what I write comes from the Institute, yeah. The Director is my sister, so it’s the easiest way for me to get new information out to the public.”

Somehow Lena finds her voice then. “Alex Danvers is your sister,” she states, and though the thought feels strained to her, the words themselves are smooth and disaffected, as if she’d made a simple observation that merited little acknowledgement. As if her heart isn’t suddenly racing behind her ribs, thundering with the knowledge that Kara Danvers is a journalist and closely related to the Director that dangles Lena’s precarious future over her head.

Which means Kara Danvers knows exactly who Lena is.

“Yeah. She’s pretty great,” Kara says, and the affection she says it with makes Lena ache for the ability to speak of her own sibling in such a way. “She can be kind of an ass sometimes, and stubborn, but she’s good people.”

Lena doesn’t know how to respond to that. The former she had discovered quite quickly for herself, even before she ever set foot in the Institute. But as much as she had to trust Alex with Lex’s research, it wasn’t the same as knowing, personally, that Alex was a good person.

When Lena doesn’t say anything, Kara leans back against the booth and holds her drink close to her chest, as if absorbing the heat into herself from the ceramic. “So, Lena,” she says, and Lena feels herself tense, “What do you do at the facility? You don’t seem much like a research type, yourself. Maybe…” Her head tilts slightly to the side, as if studying her, though her gaze is light with mirth, “Hard-edge CEO? Media Empire mogul?”

It takes Lena a moment to realize that Kara is referencing the outfit Lena is currently wearing, and she has to restrain herself from peering down at her buttoned blazer and tailored suit pants. Kara is right; it’s certainly not a common look found in a research facility, marine or otherwise, and Lena finds it a little difficult to elaborate on when the only answer she has is that Lillian Luthor had been a rather stringent in the upbringing of the Luthor children, and wardrobe was one of the few facets of Lena’s life that Lillian had utmost control. Despite that Lena is now on the complete opposite side of the country, Lillian’s influence still has its claws in a vice grip wherever it can reach.

“Well, as they say-- dress for the job you want, not the one you have,” Lena says, raising her eyebrows briefly in what she hopes is a nonchalant expression. It’s a pointless comment, considering the ownership of Luthor Marine Center was due to fall into Lena’s hands the moment Lex’s trial concluded, so it wasn’t as though there was much of a promotion available for Lena anyway beyond the uncertain days and weeks it would take for his conviction to finalize. The unfortunate irony was that she didn’t want to inherit his mess, yet she still dressed for the occasion.

Kara’s huffy laughter soothes some of Lena’s rigidness, and Lena tilts back against the booth, mirroring the woman across from her.

“You working on anything in particular, currently? I know most of the techs have one project or another. Last I heard, Sam was working with the turtles,” Kara says, leaning slightly forward. If it wasn’t for the earnest curiosity burning in the azure behind those glasses, Lena might have been more inclined to think the inquiry as suspicious.

Still, it leaves Lena a little wary. Her lips purse slightly as she considers the ramifications of lying or directing the conversation elsewhere.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Kara adds in a few moments later, tempering the interest in which she regards Lena as if she became suddenly aware of how forward she was being. “I promise I’m not secretly interviewing you or anything.”

Lena looks up as a waitress reaches over to fill her mug again, and stirs in a packet of sweetener this time as the woman walks away. After she takes a drink, she fixates her attention back on Kara. “Forgive me if I am not forthcoming,” Lena responds with a small, polite smile. “But considering you already know who I am and where I come from, it is difficult to imagine that question as entirely innocent.”

Kara doesn’t look surprised, but she does pause. Then she clears her throat lightly and bobs her head. “Ah, sorry,” she says, scratching at the end of her nose with a nail, “I wasn’t trying to hide that. I thought it would help you feel better if I didn’t bring it up.”

Something in Lena’s chest tightens. She doesn’t know what the sensation is supposed to mean, but she feels a little uncomfortable and maybe even faintly breathless. “It’s alright,” she says, more to her cup than to Kara. It’s curious that this conversation has her feeling so unexpectedly vulnerable. Lena doesn’t like vulnerability; it’s a weakness, and Lillian had told her time and time again that there was no room in the Luthor name for weakness. It was a flaw, whereas the Luthors were flawless.

One more mark against her record, then.

“I don’t have anything to hide,” Lena finally says, shrugging away the thoughts of her mother and inhaling the steam of her coffee with a sigh. “Truly. I can’t imagine many will believe me on that, but I don’t. As for my project…” She takes a moment to think, and then finishes, “Well, I had one. To help your sister fix what my brother hurt. But she doesn’t want my help.”

Kara frowns at that. It’s deep, and Lena finds she doesn’t like the look of it at all; it’s not unflattering, but it seems almost… troubled. Sad. And sadness is not something Lena was expecting to see from a person like Kara, who practically emitted sunshine out of her very pores.

“She doesn’t want it, or she won’t let you?” Kara clarifies carefully, and the sparkle of sympathy that had lit in her gaze transforms into something steadfast and determined.

Lena gives a small, noncommittal wave of her hand. “Both. They are the same, as far I as I know.” It doesn’t matter much to Lena of the distinction; regardless whether Alex wanted her help and simply couldn’t accept it or altogether had no interest in it, Lena didn’t really care. She was going to help anyway.

Not that she’d necessarily tell the sister of NCIMBR’s hardass Director, though.

“Well that’s dumb. I’m sorry,” Kara says, and the frown this time isn’t necessarily sad, but Lena notes the lines akin to frustration at the corners of Kara’s mouth as her lips purse. “No one should be barred from helping where they can.”

Lena blinks. “Well, I can’t say I’m exactly surprised,” she says, and if it sounds a little defensive, Lena chooses to ignore it. She can’t say why she’d want to agree with Alex’s choice-- because she doesn’t, and it bothers her to think she might, on some level, agree with the Director’s logic-- but Kara’s expression is both a bit unnerving and perplexing simultaneously. The way she looks at Lena is open and patient, and for a moment all Lena can do is turn away and focus on anything else but Kara’s honest gaze. “There’s little trust where my family is concerned. As much as I want to make a name for myself outside of my family, _Luthor_ is the first and only thing anyone ever hears.”

She is _not_ prepared for the soft way that Kara responds, “Well for what it’s worth, I see you as Lena first.” The words crawl up her spine like the faint tracing of fingers and Lena has to flex her hand into a fist to keep a shiver from following after it.

“Why?” Lena counters, in the same breath that her gaze snaps back to Kara’s. Her tone is halfway between incredulous curiosity and a demand, but Kara doesn’t appear to mind.

Kara shrugs. She sets her mug onto the table and glances out toward the bay for a moment. “I think everyone should be judged by their own merits,” she answers quietly, and Lena wonders at the faint distance that drags at the edge of her voice. There’s a memory lurking there, but Lena isn’t so forward as to ask about it. “Saddling someone with the blame of their forebears seems particularly unjust, to me.”

“A noble sentiment,” Lena comments, though it lacks any sort of bite. “But I agree.”

The silence that descends afterward isn’t uncomfortable, really, though there’s an element of unease that thrums within Lena still. She doesn’t want Kara’s impression of her to be marred by everything her brother and parents have been involved in-- everything she was involved in by default. The point of absconding with the Luthor Marine Center archives wasn’t to impress anyone or even in effort to clear her name, but because Lena knew its contents were paramount in the undoing of the damage Lex caused to the sea. Yet all she can feel in that exact moment is the hope that Kara sees the action-- sees _her--_ for all of the strength Lena musters to fix what she can.

Lena never cared what others thought of her intentions before now, and she finds that the inexplicable desire to prove herself to Kara manifests with such startling vigor that Lena has to drown it in a large, slow gulp of lukewarm coffee.

“Well, I know you’ve got important work to do,” Kara says, once Lena’s cup is drained and their conversation remains quiet. But she smiles at Lena, as if there’s a little secret hidden beneath her words shared just between the two of them. Private and personal, and for whatever reason, it thrills Lena to think that Kara might actually believe she has something worthwhile to offer the Institute beyond her connection to her brother. “Let’s head back to the Institute, yeah? Alex might think I kidnapped her newest recruit if we take too long.”

Her laugh comes out as a small puff of air. “I’m not too sure your sister would particularly mind,” Lena says as they slide out of the booth, and Kara grins at the easiness of her tone. Lena doesn’t know how long it’s been since she was able to be lighthearted with anyone other than Sam, and the giddiness of the idea that she could have that with Kara floods her with effervescent warmth.

“Oh, believe me, she’d mind,” Kara says, shaking her head with the same crinkle-smile that jostles the pace of Lena’s heartbeat, “You and Sam are probably the smartest people in that entire building. Alex may talk tough, but she does appreciate having you around. I promise.”

Lena never put much stock into promises before. Yet the phrase anchors deep into her chest, and she holds onto it, daring just the tiniest tendril of hope to latch on.

\---

Kara doesn’t stick around the Institute once they return. She waves off Lena’s thanks for the coffee, promising to take her back if Lena wanted-- and _God_ does Lena suddenly, violently, want nothing else-- before she’s gone, the darker red of her Subaru’s rear door disappearing over the hill.

“Christ,” Lena mutters to herself the minute she realizes she just stood on the sidewalk and watched Kara leave. For the first time, she’s glad Sam wasn’t there, if only to spare her the sly grins and arched eyebrows for the rest of the week.

\---

Lena doesn’t tell Sam about the impromptu coffee date-- not a date, she reminds herself-- but it lingers in the back of her thoughts for the rest of the day, replaying little fragments of the memory whenever she least expects it. The shine of sunlight across Kara’s glasses when she turned to smile at Lena, the depth of her sincerity when their conversation skirted too close to a poignant topic, the way Kara settled easy and carefree across from Lena even though she knew exactly who was sharing her table. It’s such a peculiar mixture of anxiety and elation that Lena can’t tell if she’s genuinely happy or if she just wants to throw up.

It doesn’t stop her from focusing on her work, at least. Alex stops by to check in and allow her some after-hours time, though Lena suspects Alex meant to make sure Lena wasn’t pulling a covert research project on the side. She’s made good progress on the analysis of the sea turtle’s tissue samples, and Alex seems pleased. No one else speaks to her except Sam when she drops by to wish her a goodnight, and after a few hours, Lena is alone in the laboratory.

It’s not the first time, but she wonders now at Kara’s promise; perhaps Alex truly does appreciate having her around, if she trusts her enough to work at night by herself.

An hour ticks by while she works. No one else comes in or returns for a forgotten item, so as soon as Lena reaches a stopping point in her chemical testing, she shuts down her station and takes a deep breath.

In her purse are her car keys; attached to one of the rings is an old golden L with a line running through the center of both vertical and horizontal axises. Lena unclips it carefully and pockets it until she returns to her laptop. She wouldn’t be surprised if Alex had some sort of video surveillance on her, so she pulls the keychain apart inside her coat pocket until her finger pad feels the exposed USB connector. It only takes a single swift motion for her to click it into the port of her computer, and appears nothing more than the micro dongle of a wireless mouse.

“You need my help, Alex,” Lena whispers to herself, as the digital catalogue of her brother’s research opens on her monitor. She skims the files, ignoring those that had anything to do with his fervent pursuit of mermaids or sirens or whatever it was he called them, until she finds the few that sound promising enough. Alex will need Lena’s help, whether she liked it or not, because Lena was the only person in the world besides Lex that could decrypt his data and understand it to its fullest extent. She might have given Alex the starting point into the Luthor archives, but Alex would get nowhere without Lena’s brain to supplement the important parts.

The softest burble of water draws her attention to the research dock. For a moment, Lena thinks she sees Kara leaning up onto the wood-- golden hair spilling down around radiant blue eyes-- but then she blinks and the vision is gone, and Lena is left alone to curse her wandering mind over pretty blonde women with pretty smiles and pretty words. Too many thoughts and strange feelings were getting crossed with Lex’s plethora of nonsensical writings, it seemed.

Lena wishes, not for the first time that night, that she had more coffee.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay! So! I promised I would upload a chapter in honor of MerMay, so here it is, in all of its unedited and unbeta'd glory. And a LOT longer than I intended.
> 
> I may go back and edit a few minor things once I get a chance to, but here it is!

“Am I insane? Tell me I’m not insane.” 

 

Lena leans up against the exam table, arms crossed as she frowns down at the turtle sedated in front of her. It’s on its backside, belly exposed. Sam is gesturing at the turtle with her blue gloves, the frustration and confusion and utter disbelief clearly evident across her face as she mutters to herself and scowls at their patient. 

 

“If you’re insane, that makes us both insane, and we all know there’s not enough room for two psychotic Luthors on this planet,” Lena comments, huffing slightly with her own scepticism. Her neatly-trimmed nails tap against her bicep to the rapid speed of the thoughts that twist and merge in her head. “You took photos of it, didn’t you?”

 

Sam blinks, and some of the disbelief fades back. “Yes, yes I did.” 

 

“Good. Find them and print them out. Blow some up to fit the page, if you’re able. Avoid pixelation.” Her eyes don’t leave the juvenile turtle even when Sam gives a brief salute and hustles for the locker room, where she must have left her cell phone. With the turtle lying on its shell and knocked out cold, Lena is free to gently prod and examine its mottled green flesh with the tip of her nitrile gloves and the small magnifying glass she’d fished out of her purse when Sam demanded her attention. 

 

First, she looks over the the area under its front flipper, scouring for signs of the little black mark that had so intrigued her and Sam a few days prior. Even magnified, she finds no trace of the strange diamond shape. It’s as if it never existed. 

Either that, or someone swapped out their turtle. 

 

That particular thought gains more merit when she measures the circumference of the tumor on its jaw and compares it to the intake exam notes; about a quarter percentage smaller in overall size, by her calculations, like it’s being sucked back into the body. 

 

“Or, someone swapped out the damn turtle,” Lena mutters to herself, but despite the changes, there’s a solid feeling in her gut that this is, in fact, the same turtle, even if the defining features Sam noted had changed. Even still, this being a different animal makes more sense than the idea that some random mark had appeared on the creature out of nowhere and, well,  _ cured  _ the damn thing. Magically cured or not, tumors didn’t just… fade away.

 

She’s checking its heart rate and respiration when Sam comes trotting back into the medical wing, triumphant with the papers in hand. 

 

“Okay, so definitely not insane,” she announces, shoving the printed image into Lena’s hand once its vitals have been recorded. “I’m wondering if it was water-soluble and washed off in the tank. Like a stain.”

 

“So, what, someone’s practicing Henna art on a sick sea turtle?” Lena flips through the pictures, tracing the shape of the diamond mark in the photo with her gaze. In the picture, it looks like someone drew the design with Sharpie or even spray painted it with a stencil; the lines are clean and bold and even in ways that seem almost inhuman. “I feel like National City College would have easier volunteers. Good work though. Wonder if they have a salon.” 

 

“Hilarious.” Sam whacks her lightly with one of the pictures, and then stretches it out next to their patient. Together they lean close to match the area on the image to the exact spot the marking had been. 

 

Lena squints closer at it with her magnifying glass. “It’s still there,” she says after a moment of observation, “but just barely.” Compared with the photo, she can just faintly make out the shape on the turtle’s skin, though it blends so much into the flesh that it’s near impossible to see without the picture in Sam’s hand. It’s hardly in the shape of a diamond anymore, but blurred like a blot of ink against the skin as if it was merely a natural variation in pigmentation. 

 

“I can take another biopsy,” Sam suggests, tilting her head as she watches Lena skim her fingertip over the spot where the marking had faded from, “See if that unknown compound from the first sample is still there. It’s surprising how deep into the tissue it went though, since it’s fading so quickly.” 

 

Lena pauses with her finger still lightly pressed against the turtle. “I wonder if it’s not fading,” she says quietly, curiosity lilting in her tone, “or washing off, but being absorbed.” 

 

Sam frowns. “I guess that’s not impossible. Weird, not but impossible.” 

 

Lena straightens up and takes one the papers to scan again. “Nothing is impossible,” she comments with a small shrug. “Somethings just take longer to prove. Or figure out.” 

 

Sam shakes her head, but smiles. “You know, I’m glad you’re the good one,” she says, and Lena lifts an eyebrow at her when her gaze flickers up from the image to catch Sam grinning. “Because you’d be terrifying if you weren’t.” 

 

“Perhaps I’ll surprise you yet,” Lena remarks, but she returns the smile with a sly curl at the corner of her mouth. Had it been any other person, Lena might have taken that comment to heart-- it might have lingered there for weeks, like it used to when Lillian would sneer such things into her face in a tone of disappointment and exasperation-- and even for a split moment, Lena wonders at herself. Hadn’t her brother thought along the same lines when he became obsessed with mermaids and myth? 

 

Lena gives her head a small shake. No, this was different. This was science, not magic or legend. She has evidence in her very hand, and all Lex had was the ravings of an unhinged megalomaniac. 

 

She remembers, suddenly, the fuzzy memory of a photo he had once shown her of a man’s silhouette deep in the water and the outline of a fin behind him. 

 

“--Alex, do you think?” 

 

Lena blinks at Sam. “What?”

 

The woman across the examination table frowns at her, dark eyes slanting as she studies Lena’s expression. “I said, there should be enough here to show to Alex. She might have some insight into what’s going on. Maybe there’s record of something similar that she knows of,” Sam repeats, once she’s certain Lena’s focus has returned. She looks down at the turtle and strokes its back flipper with the tip of her gloved finger. 

 

The thought curdles something in Lena’s stomach. On a surface level, she knows Sam means it innocently-- if not at least because there’s something going on between her and the Director in a capacity that Lena understands isn’t just professional-- but deeper, behind the layer of pragmatism, the suggestion sinks cold and sharp. Almost like jealousy. She’s not necessarily jealous of Alex, or even of the connections Sam forged beyond Lena in the years they spent separated after college, but the thought that the Director who’d forced Lena off the Recovery project could be involved in this new finding, when it was just her and Sam together again after so long… 

 

Lena cools the thoughts that threaten to darken her expression and gives a small, noncommittal shrug. “Danvers runs a tight ship,” she says, casting her gaze away from Sam and toward the office at the front of the medical wing, “I’m sure if she’d come across something similar before, you’d know about it.” Then she gestures vaguely at the turtle. “Unless it’s something she wants to keep under lock and key, in which case both of us are getting kicked from this immediately.” 

 

Sam opens her mouth to protest, but she must find something convincing about the statement, because she pauses and slowly purses her lips.  After drumming her fingertips against the counter for a moment, she responds, “I haven’t told her anything about the marking yet. Just that the test results for the virus were inconclusive. I...figured it wasn’t worth mentioning, at first. What about you?” 

 

Lena’s a little surprised, and that cold shard lodged in her chest melts somewhat. “No,” Lena answers, “I haven’t, either. It’s not entirely unusual for the turtles to cure themselves, but that only happens in adults-- the few that I know of, anyway. I’ve only shown her my findings in trying to isolate something to engineer a proper cure from. She hasn’t asked much beyond that, so there wasn’t much reason for me to bring up the mark.” 

 

Sam nods. Relief trickles in through Lena’s veins, and for a moment she wants to tell Sam the rest of her theory and ideas about the entire mystery. But then she recalls Alex’s stern refusal, and she knows that if Sam got caught going behind the Director’s back and snooping into illegal research, there would be no safety net for her to fall back on. Alex already knows how far Sam was willing to go for Lena’s sake. There would be little in Sam’s defense, even if she did have the Director’s favor. 

 

Lena thinks of Ruby, and determines not to let Sam get caught up in anything that might drag her down with the rest of the Luthors. 

 

“I guess let’s keep an eye on it, then,” Sam says, with a short sigh. “But we can’t keep it quiet forever.” 

 

“I know.” Lena watches the turtle a moment, noting that its flipper gives a small twitch as the anesthesia begins to wear off. The picture she still has grasped in her other hand is zoomed in as far as allowed before the pixelation makes it completely incomprehensible; she studies it carefully now, gaze flickering to the patient and back again before a frown pinches at her expression. She places the paper to the side, and then peels the glove from her right hand. 

 

Sam says nothing, but watches in rapt attention as Lena bends low over the turtle. Her hair sweeps over her shoulder from its high pony, but Lena ignores it as she runs the pad of her bare index finger with careful precision over the spot where the marking had once been prominent and dark. 

 

At first, she feels nothing. Just the natural bumps and ridges of the turtle’s thick, leathery flesh and all of the little divots that come with maturation and growth. 

 

Then Lena stops. She repeats the motion once, twice. 

 

Sam rounds to Lena’s side of the counter, keeping on hand on their patient, as Lena pulls a pen out of her lab coat pocket to outline something on the image she’d put aside. 

 

It’s not the same design as the one they’d seen three days ago. It’s a radial shape; a dot in the center framed by six perfectly-spaced rays, like a little minimalistic sun. 

 

“It’s a scar,” Lena states, halfway between bewilderment and certainty. She and Sam stare at it for a long, thoughtful minute. 

 

Sam scowls. “Whoever did this needs to stop messing with the damn turtles.” 

 

“Agreed.” Lena puts the paper aside and waits until Sam re-records the turtle’s vitals again. Then she turns the isoflurane down, and they wait for the turtle to wake before returning him to his medical tank. The facility is starting to fill with people; Lena glances at a few of the technicians that filter into the room, though thankfully they ignore the fact that Lena is there assisting Sam with the turtle. After three days, most have lost interest in whatever it is that Sam drags her to the medical wing for, but she’s not about to risk suspicion if Alex catches them huddled together more than once. 

 

The papers get shuffled into a pile and slid into an unmarked manilla folder, which Lena prepares to take back to her station. But not before Sam places a hand on Lena’s shoulder and gives her a meaningful look. 

 

“I’ll keep an eye out for anything similar,” Sam tells her, just before they part in the hallway between their facilities. “And let you know first thing if I find anything.” 

 

\---

 

Sam finds something two days later. 

 

The first thing that Lena notices when her friend arrives in the chemistry lab is that Sam is soaking wet. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, especially for those involved with the caretaking of the marine life, but the look in her eye is what draws Lena up short. 

It’s a sharp look that conveys everything in a quick, narrowed glance as Sam tilts her head toward the medical wing. 

 

Lena sets aside her equipment and locks her computer, and then follows after the wet slapping of Sam’s sneakers at a brisk pace. 

 

“Report?” she asks quietly, under her breath as they pass a handful of assistants in the hallway. One one of them glances up, but they appear busy with whatever they’re doing and turn away from the two women hurrying toward the medical facility.

 

“Adult female,” Sam whispers back, and the pinch to her brow is hard, just like the set to her jaw. “She’s in rough shape. Looks like she was struck with propeller blades on her fin, then set on by a shark.” 

 

Lena winces. “Prognosis?” 

 

Sam pauses to unlock the facility door with her ID card, and then holds it open. A swell of noise almost startles Lena-- voices are chattering away loud and fast amid splashing and the electronic chirrups of equipment, much more so than she’s used to from this side of the Institute. As Lena ducks slightly under her arm to enter, Sam says, “Poor. Shark managed to bite through the plastron and mess her up pretty good. Probably a tiger. The lacerations from the blade are clean, and thankfully not as deep, but she’s a big girl. Losing that much blood isn’t…”

 

She trails off, and Lena lays a hand over Sam’s forearm in consolation. 

 

“We’ll do the best we can,” Lena says, hoping it’s enough to reassure and knowing there isn’t anything she can do to promise for certain. 

 

Sam nods. She leads Lena over to a corner of the room where they’ll be out of the way as a few of the assistants race past, flanking one of the mobile aquariums . Lena can’t see what’s inside, but she knows it’s not the turtle that has Sam so restless. She says nothing as Sam flips through various files on the table beside them. 

 

“She’s in surgery,”  Sam explains once she’s gathered her materials. A moment later, she thrusts them into Lena’s hands. “She probably won’t be out for another hour or so, if she makes it that long. Look through my exam notes in the meantime. If she goes, I’ll petition Alex for a necropsy.” 

 

Lena can tell the idea makes Sam uneasy from the way her dark eyes slide toward the back of the room where the surgery suites are kept behind large panes of glass. Sam always had such a tender heart; ever since college, and possibly before, Lena had known her to be the kind of soul that wanted to save everything little creature in the world. 

 

Especially the ones that Sam hauled out of the ocean with her own two hands.

 

“Don’t,” Lena says, shaking her head. She gives Sam’s hand a brief squeeze. “If you’ve already got a blood sample, I don’t think a necropsy is going to tell us much else. I don’t have reason to believe there’s anything internal contributing to what we’ve found so far that wouldn’t express on bloodwork, and I wouldn’t want to make Alex curious if this turns up with nothing.” 

 

She doesn’t admit that part of her wants to know-- hell, she’d volunteer to do the necropsy herself if she knew it wasn’t going to trigger Alex’s suspicion-- but the ache in Sam’s downtrodden expression seals the curiosity away. There would always be another turtle, if push came to shove. 

 

A morbid line of thought, Lena scolds herself internally. 

 

Sam sucks in a breath, exhales it long and low, then nods. “Alright. Probably best we don’t push our luck,” she says, and Lena offers her a small, gentle smile. 

 

“I’ll look over your notes at my station. If anything comes up, or if there’s anything I can do--” 

 

Sam smiles, but waves a hand to interrupt. “I know, Lena. I can always count on you.” 

 

Lena studies the exhaustion lining Sam’s face. She wants to tell her to go home, or at least to take a break and nap in her car, but Lena knows Sam’s stubborn enough to push through her fatigue-- just like her. It’s what made them such great lab partners during their rotations in college. 

 

“Take it easy,” Lena murmurs finally, holding the folder to her chest with reverent gratitude. “Let me know if anything changes.” 

Sam just nods, and Lena hurries back to her lab before anyone starts wondering at her presence. 

 

\---

 

It takes all of five minutes for Lena to figure out what had Sam so harried. 

 

She stares at the intake report penned in her friend’s handwriting. It’s a standard report that details the condition of the animal when they found her during the patrol to collect and maintain the sonar equipment sunk far below the bay’s surface. She’s a large green sea turtle, probably close to that eighty-year life expectancy just from her size alone. A few pictures drop out from between the papers as Lena scans the documents, but the one that Sam had paperclipped on the backside of the exam notes is what Lena’s attention pins to. 

 

It’s the picture of an injury. The turtle had many; there were three clean slices across her front flipper courtesy of a motorboat, which were illegal in this part of the bay unless previously authorized by the Institute. Since the turtle had been found by chance, the likelihood of an illicit boat ride skyrocketed. Then there was the damage from the bite of a tiger shark. Lena could see the outline of the creature’s jaws in a gruesome, ragged crescent across the left side of her crushed plastron and its equal through the dorsal part of her shell. 

 

But this injury is different. It’s labeled “puncture?” in blue pen along the edge of the picture, which isn’t as clear as the other images that supplement the report. 

 

“Shit,” Lena says to herself as she stares at the little ray-shape on the back flipper. Unlike the other turtle, this shape isn’t a scar-- it’s a red, open wound, as fresh as the other injuries bleeding on the photo. The sight of it coupled with Sam’s note projects a sudden thought so harshly into her consciousness that it feels like her heart has launched right through her chest in the same moment. 

Lena scrambles for her laptop. She’s seen that shape before. 

 

Fear bubbles up thick and bile-like in her stomach. Even though it’s in the middle of the day, she speeds through her labyrinth of electronic files where Lex’s research is buried under layers of old diagrams and projects. Her fingers dart across the keys and trackpad, sending her screen flying as she follows the memory of the image down through his various folders. 

 

She remembers it from one of his mermaid files during a brief skim she had of his notes. It takes her longer than she expected, but within a handful of minutes Lena’s monitor halts on the blueprints of a small device. It’s long, almost fish-like in shape, narrow and sleek to propel easily through the water and a small navigation fin and rotor at one end. 

 

On the other end is a long, thick needle surrounded by six little anchoring claws. 

 

Lena’s heart nearly throws itself across her keyboard. Her throat tightens to a painful, nearly breathless degree as she follows the blueprint to the internal structure that details a storage vial within and the mechanisms that fuel the device’s delivery process. 

 

“Motherfucker,” she growls. When a few of the surrounding technicians glance over at

her, Lena slams her laptop shut before they can figure out what’s displayed on her monitor. Her first instinct is to take the rest of the day off; with no one to spy on her activities, she could throw together a rudimentary device to try and intercept the frequency these things were operating on.  _ Something _ had to control where they went, what they targeted. But first she needed to figure out the frequency. 

 

Keeping her curses to herself this time, Lena opens her computer back up and pours herself into a new application. Chasing whatever signal could be sent from devices like these sounded simple enough, but her brother never did anything unless it took a dozen and a half steps to accomplish. 

 

“Can’t spell complex without Lex!” was a favorite phrase of his when they were children, and it rings in her ears now, flooding her with the same burning annoyance as it had then.

 

\---

 

A hand moves into her periphery from somewhere behind her, and Lena nearly startles at the motion before she recognizes Noonan’s symbol stamped across the paper coffee cup set onto her countertop. 

 

“Hey stranger,” comes Kara’s voice, and Lena twists to look up at the woman smiling down at her. Kara leans against the counter with her hip, her own drink in the other hand. “Alex mentioned you’ve been hunched at your station for a few hours without a break. I thought you could use some coffee.”

 

Lena has to drag her gaze away from Kara-- whose brilliant blues look particularly vibrant today-- to her computer screen, where the clock informs her that she’s been staring dead-eyed at her monitor for over six hours since she’d made her initial discovery that morning. As if on cue, her eyes suddenly feel dry and a dull ache takes immediate residence directly behind them. 

 

She lifts a hand and presses fingers into her eye sockets to staunch the pain, careful not to rub at her mascara, and sighs. “Thank you, Kara,” Lena says, blinking back up at her. Kara’s hair is wound into a neat bun again, perfectly coiffed and kept. The button-down she’s wearing is a dark navy with small silver polka-dots, and it’s tailored to her figure so well that Lena has to physically stop her gaze from traveling down the length of Kara’s body to admire the fit. And god, if Lena so much as glances at the hip-hugger slacks that slim to Kara’s thighs, she might  _ actually  _ have a heart attack. 

 

“Do you want to go on a walk?” Kara asks, idly touching the frames of her glasses, and the question seizes something in Lena’s chest with surprising heat. “Fresh air always helps clear my head if I spend too much time inside. Helps with eye strain, too.” 

 

It’s a little ridiculous how much Lena desperately wants to do just that. Her lips part almost too fast to accept the offer, but she reigns back the response just long enough to consider the consequence of leaving her station when she’d been working so hard on isolating what kind of code her brother might have used to program these machines. She was in a good space and making progress, and even if the walk only took a handful of minutes, she’d be left with the distracting memory of it for the rest of the day. Lena looks back at her computer and frowns, hesitating. 

 

“If it were any other day,” she finally settles on, glancing back up at Kara. “Absolutely. But right now, I just…”

 

Kara’s smile doesn’t wane, but it softens just the slightest bit. “Hey, it’s okay,” she says, and Lena is intimately aware of how Kara reaches out to give her shoulder a small, reassuring touch. “Sounds like you got a lot of work to do. Raincheck, yeah?” 

 

Lena can’t help the smile that steals across her mouth. “Raincheck,” she repeats, and she takes the coffee cup when Kara offers it directly to her. It’s still warm, and she has to resist the temptation to cradle it close to herself. 

 

Kara’s nose crinkles just slightly with the widening of her grin. She stands from where she’s pressed against the counter as if turning to depart, but pauses long enough to add over her shoulder, “Maybe some time you can tell me about your project!” And then she’s gone, disappearing into the hallway before Lena can truly register the thought. 

 

The heat curling through her insides deflates into a gust of cold air. Lena can’t tell Kara. The absolute  _ last  _ person she could tell about her findings was Kara Danvers, investigative journalist into environmental crises, tropical sunshine incarnate. 

 

With a deep breath, Lena takes a sip of the coffee. It’s perfect; dark roast, no cream, only just sweet enough to counter the bitter edge. She holds the cup out and blinks at it. Lena expected some sort of latte, maybe, or whatever standard coffee any sane person probably drank-- or hell, the sugary concoction she’d seen Kara enjoy at Noonan’s-- but she hadn’t even the slightest bit considered that Kara would have remembered what she ordered last week. 

 

Or that Kara even paid attention to it. 

 

The warmth returns with vigor in Lena’s chest, nearly overwhelming her when the cardboard sleeve slips and she sees her name written in neat script on the cup and the little doodle of a fish next to it. 

 

\---

 

Lena doesn’t see Sam much over the course of the next few days. From the sparse updates she’s able to get from the other staff, the turtle Sam had pulled from the bay made it through the surgery but was having difficulty in recovery, so the round-the-clock care had taken up most of Sam’s time. Which Lena didn’t mind. It left her more time to consider alternate theories about what her brother’s devices were doing on this side of the country, and ways to counter whatever new heinous scheme he was planning. After all, if she knew her brother, Lena was certain Lex wasn’t going to such lengths to infect the sea turtle population just for for the thrill of it. 

 

Though she wouldn’t put it past him to get some sort of sick satisfaction out of the aftermath, anyway. He never did like turtles much. 

 

Kara returns to her a few days after the first time bearing more coffee, and Lena’s not sure she’s ever been so excited to see another person in her life. It’s for the coffee, of course, and this time she doesn’t wait for Kara to leave before taking a too-eager sip and scalding her tongue. 

 

Kara laughs at her. 

 

“Take it easy, tiger,” she says at the pinch of pain screwed into Lena’s expression. “It’s not a shot.” 

 

“What a shame. I could use one of those, too,” Lena mumbles around her burnt tongue, and Kara pities her with an amused smile.

 

“Espresso, vodka, or both? Bet I could find some somewhere.” 

 

Lena pauses, then squints over at Kara sitting on the countertop beside her. “I don’t think Alex would take kindly to her employees drinking on Institute property,” she remarks after a moment, though the idea of getting inebriated with Kara is quite suddenly the only thing Lena is capable of thinking about. 

 

Besides saving the turtles, obviously. 

 

Kara rolls her eyes and gives a small shake of her head. When she bends slightly closer, there’s a conspiratorial edge to her voice when she says, “If you ever have a free moment, there’s a great sushi restaurant nearby that just opened up. Alex says they’ve got good sake.” 

 

Lena opens her mouth, closes it, and opens it again without saying a word. 

 

Kara flashes her a beaming smile. “I did say I could show you around town. Looks like you need a break, anyway.” She gestures at Lena’s computer and the stacks of diagrams that have gathered around her station. There are also other empty coffee mugs that Lena brought from the cafe down the street from her hotel and a smattering of protein bar wrappers. She doesn’t remember the last time she actually took a lunch break in lieu of demolishing a few snacks from the lobby vending machine at her station, and her stomach threatens to loose a traitorous rumble at the mere thought of a proper meal.

 

“Now?”

 

Kara leans against the counter and dips her head to the side. A piece of sunny blonde hair slips loose from behind her ear, and Lena’s fingers twitch with the thought of tucking it back into place. “It’s not really a break if you leave it for after you’re all done.” 

 

But just the suggestion of a break reminds Lena of what she’s supposed to be doing. She looks at her computer and internally curses her brother several hundred times over again. There could be no breaks until she figured out a way to stop whatever was happening in the depths of the Pacific before every sea turtle was infected. 

 

Lena feels her expression fall. She can’t. She has to keep going. 

 

By some miracle, Kara already appears to sense this. She rests a hand on Lena’s arm and nods. “No big deal,” she says, though now there’s an element of concern ghosting through her tone. “But take care of yourself, okay? Can’t save the world if you run yourself to the bone first.” 

 

_ You have no idea _ , Lena wants to tell her. It’s a startling, unfamiliar feeling, and it bolts into her so fiercely that for a moment she wonders if the caffeine is already giving her heart palpitations. Yet, now that the words are formed in her head, Lena can’t shake the knowledge that she wants to share what she found with Kara. Her ideas, her theories, her plans to intercept her brother’s schemes before he causes any more irreparable damage. And it’s so bizarre, because she hasn’t even had the chance to tell Sam yet, and all she’s shared with Kara since they met was some coffee and mildly flirtatious conversation (if it was fliratous at all and not just the craving of human attention that Lena falls victim to on an embarrassingly frequent basis). Nothing deep, nothing significant beyond the small collection of moments that suggested Kara wasn’t about to saddle her with the weight of her family’s burden by name alone. 

 

And it’s utterly  _ terrifying _ , because Lena can feel herself already recoiling from the potential of how Kara might react if she found out what Lex was still responsible for. How that sweet smile might sour if she knew that Lena was about to inherit the mess of the Luthor Marine Center and all of its dark secrets, including whatever horrible machinations Lex is currently puppeteering from his prison cell. 

 

“I’m sorry, Kara,” Lena hears herself say, and if her words are suddenly a little clipped, a little sharp, she tries not to notice. “But I really do have a lot of work to do.” Lena turns back to her computer and stares at the program still running through the various calculations she’d plugged in twenty minutes ago. Her heart clenches hard in her chest when Kara reluctantly pulls her hand from Lena’s arm. 

 

“That’s alright,” Kara says, and though Lena doesn’t look to her, she can hear the frown in Kara’s voice. “Just-- just let me know when you have some time. No rush.” 

 

Lena keeps her gaze trained on her screen even as Kara moves away. There’s a long stretch of silence before Lena hears the soft tap of footsteps over the linoleum, but by the time that Lena decides to turn and apologize, Kara’s already gone. 

 

She exhales loud and short. That was twice Lena declined to take Kara’s invitation, and the memory of their time at Noonan’s sends a dull throb of disappointment through her. She wasn’t terribly adept at making friends; Sam was her sole surviving relationship outside of college, and even  _ in  _ college there had only been a collection of them small enough to count on one hand. Kara’s determination is new and rather unsettling, but even in the small amount of time that Lena had come to know the youngest Danvers, it felt… nauseating to be forced to sever those ties. 

 

Lena stares down at the newest cup of coffee, courtesy of Kara, still sitting where she had left it to cool beside her laptop. There’s more handwriting covered by the sleeve. She edges the cardboard down with the tip of her nail to reveal “Lena” bracketed by little stars. One of them has a face, and she realizes it’s supposed to be a starfish. 

 

Something flutters in her stomach at the sight. 

 

When she finishes the cup, Lena places it next to its empty companion from the other day with the fish doodle, lined up at the back of her station like little trophies. 

 

\---

 

“You’re clear.” 

 

Sam’s soft voice pierces through the hush of water as it laps against the wooden dock. 

 

A small silver box plops into the sea from Lena’s hand, and she watches it slowly sink into the deep before the screen of her cell phone beeps. Both of them glance up, keeping a watchful eye on the research center where most of the staff continue on their routines without so much as noticing the two women at the end of the dock. 

 

Lena pushes identical-looking objects into Sam’s equipment bag among the sonar devices she usually drops and collects during her patrols. “Place them wherever, so long as you can make a rough perimeter,” Lena says. “They shouldn’t stand out on your sonar.”

 

Sam glances toward the bag, but doesn’t appear any more apprehensive than Lena feels. She knows that Sam is troubled, but having her on Lena’s side, even once Lena finally broke down and explained what she discovered, felt like clinging to a safety raft amidst a storm. It was all she had to keep herself steady, especially now that they were finding those little puncture wounds on all manners of animal-- the newest was a young dolphin, and before him a cantankerous elephant seal bull.  

 

“I hope this works,” Sam murmurs. 

 

Lena remains crouched at the edge of the dock for a moment more, gazing intently at the water ebbing softly around the wooden posts. It’s got a faint greenish tinge to it from all the algae and kelp, and she can only see a few feet in before the murky depths swallow whatever lies below. Her device has yet to meet the bottom; she keeps an eye on her phone screen until the tracker no longer descends. 

 

She doesn’t say,  _ Me too _ , even though the thin air in her lungs wants to respond with nothing else. Instead, Lena breathes deep, even, settling herself with the scent of brine despite the nerves firing sharp and electric beneath her skin. 

 

“It will,” Lena states firmly, and she finally stands and pockets her phone. “I will find out what he’s up to and stop him. I promise.” 

 

Sam rocks back on her heels, arms crossed loosely over her center. Her fingers drum restlessly against her sides. She’s worried, Lena can tell, because she worries like a mother. 

 

Well. A good mother. 

 

“I know you will,” Sam says. “Just be safe, okay?” 

 

Lena nods, but she doesn’t answer right away. They both gaze out at the marina in the near distance for a silent moment, only the occasional squawk of a seagull or faraway rumble of an engine breaking through the monotonous rocking of the waves and electronic alarms from within the facility. Something disrupts the surface of the water just beyond the edge of the dock, but it’s enough motion to draw their attention. Whatever it was has already ducked low beneath the surface, hidden by the gloom of algae-heavy shallows, by the time either of them think to investigate. 

 

“You should tell Alex,” Sam suggests suddenly, and Lena has to fight back the instinctive blanch to the idea. She knows Sam is right; Sam is always-- usually-- right. 

 

“I know,” Lena mutters, and she presses a wet hand against her head. Her skin is warm against the claminess of her palm, and it’s a tiny salve against the headache spurred by the thought of approaching the Director on her own. When the weight of Sam’s touch presses lightly onto her shoulder, Lena lets her arm fall back to her side and a soft sigh follows it. “I was planning to. It’s just...difficult,” she says as she swallows, and Sam’s grip tightens just slightly, “to trust that she’ll trust me.” 

 

“I understand,” Sam says, gentle, like a mother would, and Lena almost feels a little silly at how she wishes Lillian could have been half of what Sam is now, “I can’t imagine anything about it is easy.”

 

Lena nods, takes a breath, and then lifts an eyebrow at Sam from the corner of her eye. “You’ll come visit me in jail, won’t you?”

 

“I’ll bring you a cake and hide a nail file inside it,” Sam answers, without missing a beat. 

 

\---

 

That night, Lena pulls her laptop close to herself as she props up against the headboard of her bed. She’s got her blue-light glasses on, an old tee-shirt she’d stolen from Sam, and a cup of Noonan’s black coffee at her bedside table. It’s become somewhat of an addiction now, if only because their dark roast is damn delicious, and  _ not  _ because she was secretly hoping to find Kara already at the counter when Lena had stopped by Noonan’s after her shift. 

 

Ridiculous.

 

Lex’s files are open on her screen as she reads. Most of it are schematics for medical equipment; she finds the original design of his underwater transmitters, as well as a few other pieces that look vaguely familiar, and even something of hers she’d roughly thrown together toward the end of her college career and abandoned. All of it improved upon, altered, and given purpose for whatever Lex’s new pursuit was. She reads through a few of them, noting what designs change and what doesn’t. At the very least, she’ll know how to dismantle them if need be. 

 

It isn’t until the clock’s display encroaches upon early morning that Lena finally drags her mouse over to Lex’s other files.  _ Mermaids _ , they’re titled. She pauses a moment, sipping at the last of the coffee that had grown cold through the night, and hesitates only briefly before opening the folder.

 

She wonders if perhaps that little black mark is in here, somewhere, offering her clues as to why it had shown up and what it was for. 

 

\---

 

It’s only when her sensors find what she’s looking for that Lena finally decides to step into Alex’s office. 

It takes a couple days-- a couple days of religiously scanning the ocean floor with her little devices, tracking the signals that Lex’s robots fire off into the deep, while the number of coffee cups with Lena’s name scribbled by Kara’s hand grows at her station-- but it’s enough that when she finally maps out the area where her brother has nestled his little command center beneath the sea, Lena gathers everything and locks the door to Alex’s office behind her.

 

“Lena,” Alex says, and she doesn’t bother to hide the mystified curiosity in her voice as she watches Lena approach the desk with a handful of documents. “What’s this about?”

 

She doesn’t answer just yet. Guilt flutters faintly within her stomach; Alex trusted her, that much Lena had come to understand over the last few weeks, and the outcome of this meeting could determine the longevity of Lena’s career. Or length of incarceration. 

 

Instead, she hands Alex several folders and sets a metal cube on the desk. 

 

Alex eyes it, but begins to flip through the papers as Lena presses a sequence into the cube’s keypad. Spectral green threads flow up a few inches from the top of the device, illuminating the office in neon light as the hologram forms a small map of the sea floor. 

 

“The sick sea turtles,” Lena says, a little more forcefully than she’d really meant to, “and the virus that the dolphin calf was tested for. It’s not being transmitted cross-species. It’s being adapted separately and purposefully spread through these populations. These lesions--” Lena taps at the photograph that Alex stilled on, drawing the Director’s stern gaze briefly to the sun-shaped wound shared between all of the animals Sam had brought to Lena’s attention, “--are injection sites. There are robotic transmitters in the water that are locating each specimen via remote control to infect with each strain of virus.” 

 

Alex listens silently. The longer Lena speaks, the darker the Director’s eyes become until the intensity pricks against Lena’s skin. “How do you know this?” It’s a demand, not a question, and phrased with a warning framed around each softly uttered word. 

 

Like when she was little, the anxiety blazing up through her insides feels suffocating. It strains under her skin, tightening around her chest like fingers wrapped around her ribcage. The shadow of Alex’s stare is heavy and swimming with consequence; it almost reminds her of Lillian and all of the furious judgement that never left those eyes whenever Lena did something wrong. 

 

Lena stares back, outwardly as stoic as Lillian had moulded her. If perhaps her eyes shine a little more fiercely under the weight of the tension coiling about the room, there’s nothing else to indicate either of them notice. 

 

“Lex’s research,” she answers coolly, disaffected and calm. As if she’d found the answer in the back of a textbook. “I found the schematics for the transmitters in some of his files. There’s also notes about a viral strain he discovered and his experiments with it over the last five years.” She pulls a report out from one of the folders that Alex had yet to open; it’s a handwritten copy, something Lena had discovered while digging through his older documents. He always was one to keep a paper trail, considering how easily Lena could break into his electronic ones. It was extraordinary luck that Lena had thought to scan all of his physical copies before handing the entirety of the Luthor research library to the Institute. “The epidermal pattern of the injection sites aligns perfectly with the schematics. And it explains the drastic increase in the infected sea turtle percentage from last quarter.” 

 

Alex slowly lowers the report in her hand to her desk. A myriad of different emotions flicker across her face, but it’s all overshadowed by the draw of her eyebrows and the frown twitching with frustration at her mouth. “I told you,” she starts, and there’s a strain in her voice, “not to get involved with this. Not to touch it.” 

 

“With all due respect, Director,” Lena responds, just as tensed, “That was a stupid decision on your part. You don’t know what you’re looking for.” 

 

Alex blinks, momentarily surprised. 

 

Lena moves back to bring the hologram into focus. Another sequence on the box has the map changing, zeroing in until the outline of a small, square object is highlighted in soft green light somewhere along the seafloor. “If you want to actually do something about this, you have to listen to me,” Lena adds, and maybe she sounds a little more aggressive at this point, because her other option was desperation and Lena Luthor was  _ not  _ a desperate woman. “He’s using a specialized frequency to control the transmitters. They’re remote, but the signal isn’t originating from above surface level-- that’s why it’s not getting detected by any radio equipment.” She takes a small breath. “He has a control panel hidden in the bay. It has to be manually disabled.” 

 

There’s a lapse in the conversation for a long, quiet period. 

 

Then, “How did you find it?” 

 

Without hesitation, Lena hands her one of the small objects she and Sam had dropped into the ocean. Alex turns it over in her palm, eyebrows lifted high. “I developed a sensor,” Lena answers, careful to keep herself at ease as she speaks, “It works like a net. I was able to determine which frequencies he could be using, and narrowed down where the control panel is.”

 

Alex sets the sensor on her desk beside the reports. She doesn’t look at Lena for a while, her gaze bouncing thoughtfully between the device and the files. Her fingers are latticed together, propping up her chin as she thinks. 

 

When Alex closes her eyes, Lena can see the way her throat moves, the way her chest rises in a short, albeit decisive, breath. 

 

“Let me reiterate something,” the Director says, quiet, but careful, “This is illegal research we’re talking about. Government restricted. Government  _ controlled _ . It’s one thing that you brought it to me for safe keeping, and God forbid anyone actually finds out that the Institute has it, but it’s another to use it for your own means. Behind my back, no less.” 

 

“Alex--” Lena starts, ready to fight, ready to argue, but Alex’s dark eyes snap open and silence her with the significance of the stare. 

 

“I didn’t tell you to stay away from this because I don’t trust your intentions, Lena,” Alex continues, as if Lena hadn’t attempted to interrupt at all, “I did it because I knew that as soon as anyone found out you were involved somehow with Lex’s work-- however benign the involvement-- someone would pit it against you. Someone would take that chance to put you behind bars. I can take that risk, because I’m not related to Lex or Lionel or Lillian. I can’t let  _ you  _ risk that. I have no way to defend you if it happens.” 

 

If Lena’s eyes are suddenly red, Alex doesn’t comment on it. 

 

“This is about  _ protecting  _ me?” Lena asks, soft, flustered, and shaking her head in disbelief. “What about the ‘funding’? The ‘crew’?” 

 

Alex shrugs. “Also valid reasons as to why I can’t let you touch anything with your brother’s name on it. The fact that he now appears responsible for the turtle crisis makes your involvement with a cure potentially dangerous.” When Alex leans forward over her desk, Lena holds her tongue. “You are the most valuable addition to this team since… well, Sam, probably. Or Winn, if not more. And I like you, Lena. I believe you want to help. But as a Director, I have to be able to make these decisions. I have to be able to draw a line. And this line is a big one.” 

 

Lena feels her throat swell, feels that hard, oppressive heat gather in the muscle of her jaw and beneath the skin of her cheeks. “What good does my brother’s research do,” she starts, halfway between a whisper and a thinly veiled growl of frustration, “if you can’t use it? If you can’t even read it?” A sharp exhale leaves her when she notices a stray tear escape, and she swipes it away as she takes another breath. “Tell me truthfully: would you have found the control panel without my devices? Would you have known what to look for? Would you even have figured out that there was something to look for in the first place?” She exhales hard. “Did you even  _ know  _ Lex was plotting something out here?”

 

The soft drumming of Alex’s fingers on the desk patters like raindrops for a moment before she looks away. “Yes,” Alex answers, a little flat. “I know he’s involved with something here.” 

 

Lena stares. 

 

“How--?” she tries, but Alex shakes her head. 

 

“Sorry, no details. But there’s a reason I contacted you about coming here, and it’s not because I wanted the step-by-step on the Atlantic oil spill,” Alex explains, and the hairs on the back of Lena’s neck raise slightly at the revelation of a mystery she hadn’t known existed until just then. “I may not be a Luthor, but I know my fair share of hacking into encrypted documents and deciphering code.” 

 

Lena purses her lips. “Impressive,” she comments with no particular enthusiasm, “but unless you plan on acting any time soon, every sea creature within a hundred mile radius of this control panel--” she jabs a finger at the hologram still illuminated between them, “--is going to become infected with this virus. We don’t know how it affects non-sea turtle animals yet. This is a disaster waiting to happen, and I am  _ literally  _ giving you the know-how to stop it from spreading further. Let me  _ help _ , Director.” 

 

Alex leans back against her chair. The stern look of appraisal she rakes over Lena sends little sparks of worry into her gut, but the longer Alex looks, the more Lena begins to hope that something is holding the Director back from outright denying her again. 

 

It surges the next moment when a sigh escapes from Alex’s mouth. 

 

She gestures at the reports still spread across her desk. “And what do you propose to do about all this?” Alex inquires, sounding slightly exhausted and doubly as annoyed. 

 

Lena swallows back the relief that rushes sweet and soothing into her chest. “To manually disarm it, I’ll need a submersible,” she begins, quick and sharp and bristling with new confidence as she focuses her attention onto the hologram and supplemental diagrams, “It can’t be disabled with code alone, so it can’t be hacked into remotely. My brother likely used his personal ADS-- the “Lexosuit,” he calls it-- to install and maintain the control panel, which means I’ll need something more dexterous than an ROV. Personally manned, ambient pressure--” 

 

“I’m not sending you in a submersible by yourself,” Alex interrupts. 

 

Lena pauses, caught off guard, before composing herself with the rigid straightening of her spine. “I’m afraid there’s not much choice,” she returns, just as firm. “I could modify a remote vehicle to the heavens and it still wouldn’t be a good enough substitute for a proper diving suit. That means I at least need a solo sub, and I could attach a specialized arm--”

 

“Lena,” Alex says, louder this time, and Lena cuts off abruptly. “I cannot send you down there. Not even with a team. The fact that I’m even entertaining this is dangerous enough. If I follow this lead, it’s with someone else in a submersible, and your name is as far away as possible from these findings.” 

 

Her jaw hurts. It wobbles from the painful clench of muscle that feels like it might snap. “It has to be me,” Lena says through her teeth, fingers curled into her palms until her fists feel numb. 

 

“It can’t be you,” Alex counters, “You can give me instructions on how to disable it, but--”

 

“ _ It has to be me _ ,” Lena snaps, angry, explosive, smacking her hands down onto Alex’s desk with such force that the hologram rattles, “because he will have rigged the damn thing to explode if anything goes wrong, and I will not--  _ I will NOT- _ \- let someone else die for my mistake!” 

 

The silence that follows her outburst is charged, and it crawls over her skin like a physical creature coiling tighter around the room until she’s about to suffocate. Alex watches her. It’s not an expression of surprise or alarm, but Lena can’t identify the shadow that draws over Alex’s hard face. 

 

Lena takes a breath, slightly tacky from the emotion still congesting her airways. 

 

“We’ll speak about this later,” Lena tells her, before snatching her hologram off the desk and whirling on her heel for the door. Alex says nothing, but Lena can feel that stare follow her out of the office, like it’s digging past her flesh and into the chamber where she keeps all of her secrets. 

 

\---

 

Lena doesn’t tell Sam how the meeting goes-- she hardly even sees Sam for the rest of the day-- but it’s like Sam has some paranormal intuition for these things, because not fifteen minutes after Lena arrives home at her hotel room, her favorite Chinese is delivered to her door with an absurd amount of fortune cookies attached. 

 

It’s college nostalgia with Sam written all over it.

 

“Your shoes will make you happy today,” Lena reads aloud from her couch, where she has an empty rice carton propped up on a knee and the bag of cookies opened in her lap. She nibbles on the vanilla wafer and frowns at the little piece of paper before glancing at her shoes neatly tucked into a row at the entry of her suite. “That’s...great.” She cracks open another one and slips out the paper. 

 

“People are naturally attracted to you.”

 

Lena snorts, and tosses the paper to the floor. 

 

“Keep your eye out for someone special.” It’s almost painful how fast the image of Kara springs to mind, and the embarrassment that quickly follows has Lena crumbling the slip into a wad and chucking it somewhere toward her wastebasket. 

 

She reads the next one through a mouthful of cookie. “A chance meeting opens new doors to success and friendship,” it declares, and Lena rolls her eyes, especially now that the thought of Kara seems to adhere to every consecutive word on each fortune. Lena had never been a superstitious type or even that interested in anything to do with the mystic arts-- all of it was simply idle entertainment, little quirks to laugh over and soon forget. It was all just psychological phenomena, assigned unique meaning by each individual through their own personal experiences and connections. It meant nothing. 

 

“A man or woman you desire feels the same about--  _ oh, for Christ’s sake. _ ” 

 

Lena shoves the rest of the cookies back into the bag, ties it closed, and sets it on the far side of her dining room table. Sam was responsible for this, somehow. Damn her and her weirdly insightful fortune cookies. 

 

As she cleans up the trash, Lena wonders about Kara. Wonders what she’s doing, what she’s been up to. Lena hasn’t seen Kara since the last attempt to persuade her to take a break. There hasn’t been any sign of her at the Institute, and while Lena knows that Kara is busy-- she does work outside of the Institute, after all-- an irrational part of her plants little seeds of fear that somehow, for whatever reason, Kara might be avoiding her. 

 

“How ridiculous,” Lena mutters to herself, picking up the little ball of fortune paper she’d thrown from her couch off the vinyl flooring. Of course Kara wasn’t avoiding her. Kara had better things to do with her life than fuss over whether Lena Luthor wanted to join her for lunch or not. And she had no reason to believe that Alex might have told her sister everything Lena had been doing, and what she wanted to do, so surely Kara wasn’t upset-- 

 

Lena snatches the bag of cookies from her table to fish out one more. Nothing placated her anxiety like a cookie, and she’d be damned if she let them go to waste. 

 

She almost doesn’t read the fortune when the wafer snaps in half under her fingers. As she sits on her bed, laptop pulled onto her knees while she munches on the cookie, it flutters face down onto her duvet. She has half a mind to leave it there or use it later as a bookmark. 

 

Lena’s ten minutes into her research before she grabs for the discarded fortune and stretches it out front of her eyes. 

 

_ The greatest risk is not taking one _ , it reads. 

 

She stares at it for a long minute. Then up at her laptop. 

 

A display of various diving exosuits are lit up on her screen. They’re bulky and awkward looking in a small selection of green colors, but Lena considers them, bottom lip caught between her teeth.  Her mouse hovers over one, undecided, the numbers of its price tag a glaring bright red. 

 

She could do this. She could lead the dive herself, disable and disarm whatever traps Lex had laid two thousand feet under the surface. Lena knew how to make such purchases untraceable, how to bury it in the Luthor Marine Center’s finances and who to pay to keep it quiet. She didn’t need Alex’s permission to stop her brother from continuing his lunacy.

 

The fortune reminds her of what her father used to tout to her and Lex when they were children.  _ The greater the risk, the greater the reward _ , he used to say, a mantra he’d spent years drilling into their young, impressionable skulls. It’s what had led her brother on his conquest of the sea-- but in his case, there was no reward. 

 

_ The greater the risk, the greater the fall _ , she would remind herself. But the time for caution was over. She tried it their way. She tried to diplomatic about it. All it did was postpone the inevitable.

 

Lena looks once more at the fortune in her hand. If there was one thing she knew for absolutely certain, it was that it took a Luthor to stop a Luthor. 

 

“Greatest risk, indeed,” she breathes. 

 

\---

 

What Alex doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right?

 

Lena tries not to think much about it when the boat ferrying her-- well, Luthor Marine Center’s-- new ADS comes to port at the end of a private dock a mile or so out from the Institute’s research bay. She’s alone, arms wrapped around the cardigan she has pulled tight around herself, as the chilled winds of the late night sea spray across the dock. 

 

She’s not cold, really, considering she’s wearing a wetsuit. Yet there’s a tremor just beneath her skin as she watches the approach of the catamaran and the small handful of men she’d paid to operate the vessel while she was underwater. In the pitch of night it’s difficult to make out any one particular face against another, and she made sure to forget any names attached to the profiles sent to her by the agency. 

 

“Dr. K,” says one of them, and Lena takes his offered hand as he pulls her from the dock and onto the boat. It bobs gently under her feet as she gains her footing over the hull. 

 

The engine is a soft chugging drone, thankfully inconspicuous against the louder, harsher sounds of the fishing boats that occasionally sail in on this side of the marina. The Institute is in the distance, the faintest light from its facility glittering across the shadowy water. 

 

Lena watches it for a moment. She wonders, briefly, what Alex will do when-- if-- she finds out what Lena has been up to. Will she turn Lena over to the authorities? Will she fire Lena from the Institute, and bar her from ever setting foot on the grounds again?

 

Strangely enough, Lena finds herself more concerned over what Kara will think once Alex eventually tells her the truth. 

 

“Dr. K,” the first man repeats, and Lena looks away from the Institute to follow him toward the center of the boat. The ADS is there; it’s bulbous and large, meant likely to accommodate a person much taller than she. It reminds her vaguely of the Michelin Man tire mascot, only the suit is blueish green along the arms and chrome around the body. “Everything’s been prepped. We’ve got about half an hour ‘til we hit the location you requested.” 

 

She nods, then waves him off. Even if the suit came with all the modifications she requested (and paid for), there were still adjustments she needed to make. 

 

As the boat drifts out from the harbor, Lena is suddenly struck with the sensation of being watched-- but when she glances behind herself toward the black sea water between the catamaran and the receding silhouette of the Institute, she sees nothing. 

 

\---

 

Lena’s incredibly lucky she’s not claustrophobic. 

 

The suit is as awkward in water as it is in air, but she manages, even though she’s never personally manned an ADS before now. Solo subs and other small submersibles, sure-- they were all required skills through her college career, and even in practice for the Luthor Marine Center. Her experience as a SCUBA diver, however, is sorely misplaced with this cumbersome suit.

 

At least the controls are similar enough to other submersibles. She finds the thruster switch and kicks forward as the flood lights from the catamaran slowly die above her, obscured by the deep in which she sinks. 

 

It takes a long time to reach the bottom. 

 

Young Lena would have thrilled at the opportunity; would have delighted in the silvery flashes of fish as they dart out of her way, just beyond the peripheral of the light beam she angles down against the seafloor. Would have pretended she was an astronaut on the moon as she bounces slowly from one massive boot to the next, propulsed by the thruster packs on her backside. It’s dark and ominous down here, despite all of the little lights and chimes within her suit to keep her company. 

 

She has the coordinates for the control panel lit up on the inside of the acrylic helmet and the color imaging sonar in the bottom corner, out of her immediately field of vision. It beeps every so often, highlighting whatever small creatures that remain within range in tiny yellow and orange pin-pricks that would have appeared nonsensical to anyone untrained in reading such a display. 

 

Lena ignores it, her gaze trained exclusively on the void that engulfs the outside of the ADS. The helmet is gently illuminated by interior LED lights that radiate faintly outward, but it doesn’t do much to penetrate the gloom. Her breath is calm, carefully controlled; it suggests nothing of the dread that spikes and rolls inside her stomach, quickened by the oppressive darkness that enshrouds her. This far down, there would be little difference if she’d made the trek during the day-- but the thought that she’s alone in the dead of night two thousand feet beneath the Pacific is a traitorous one, and it takes most of her self-control not to give into the icy panic looming just behind her. In truth, the ocean is absolutely terrifying, and it instills within her equal parts fear and awe. 

 

It doesn’t take her long to find the control panel. It’s moderately sized, no larger than the body of her Volvo, hidden beneath the lip of a rock shelf and obscured by a wreath of kelp that had dislodged from the nearby kelp forest. Lena can’t imagine why her brother didn’t just hide it in the kelp forest itself, with all the cover it offered. Even with it partially concealed in a crevice, it’s still visible enough to pick out with a sweep of her lantern. 

 

“Alright, Lex,” she says, mostly so the eerie vastness of her surroundings doesn’t start to trip her heart rate, “Let’s see what kind of security you’ve managed all the way down here.”

 

The fully-articulated joints of the ADS allow Lena to kneel into the sand. The motion sends up a slow crawling cloud of murk, but Lena focuses on the control panel as she sets the lantern on a flat outcropping of stone. The light stretches out into the dark, glinting off the hood of the panel, before disappearing into the abyss just beyond Lena’s camp. 

 

She realizes, with a painfully erratic jolt of her heart, that the darkness just beyond the panel isn’t from the staggering depth at which she’s stuck. 

 

There’s a massive canyon behind the panel cut so deeply into the sea floor it’s as if the water itself had turned to solid black rock. 

 

“That’s not frightening or anything,” Lena mutters to herself, closing her eyes long enough to regain the measured pace of her breath. There was a reason Lena preferred her laboratory to deep-sea diving. 

 

The sonar display in her helmet suddenly beeps. When she glances at it, Lena notices the swell of color as something large passes by just out of range somewhere overhead. It doesn’t stay long enough on the sonar for her to gauge an accurate size, but from what she saw, it might have been a dolphin. Except dolphins didn’t swim down this far.

 

Lena grits her teeth. “I’m going to kill him. Fratricide can’t be that much more of a sentence than what he’s already got over my head.” 

 

She continues to growl expletives in Lex’s name as she returns her attention to the control panel. The screwdriver attachment works well enough. It takes her a little while to locate the seams of the aluminum frame, and even longer to figure out where the screws are hidden, but eventually she pries the first panel away to expose the wiring beneath. Every wire is encased in water-proof tubing, including the powerlines, though Lena knew sea water wouldn’t be able to disrupt the panel anyway. The whole thing could flood and it would still work as intended. 

 

It’d be too easy to get rid of otherwise. 

 

Lena pulls at a few of the wires and traces where they loop to through the rest of the exposed circuits. The mechanical arms of the ADS aren’t the best substitutes for actually using her hands, but she’d fine-tuned the motor capabilities of the manipulator jaws at the ends of the arms to mimic the dexterity of fingers. Very, very stiff fingers. 

 

It wouldn’t be as simple as cutting the right wire, she knows. She needs to overload the computer operating within the chamber of the panel, but with the proper strategy; otherwise, the whole thing might blow up in her face. 

 

Which, Lena muses as she connects a cable from her ADS to a port in the panel, would be one way of getting rid of the damned thing. 

 

The source code that she pulls up onto the small screen embedded within her suit makes her frown. It’s not terribly complex code; the programming language he uses is common enough that she’d learned it back in grade school. But the algorithms he programmed are very odd, and it’s not until she recognizes the pattern a good twenty minutes later that Lena sighs in exasperation. 

 

The sonar beeps again. Loudly. 

 

Lena starts, torn out of her concentration to stare up and out at the surrounding darkness. Though she sees nothing in the inky swath stretched above her head, the shape on the sonar seems close-- alarmingly close. 

 

Then it stops. 

 

Lena holds her breath. The quiet is only broken by the rapid flutter of her heart rate monitor and the rhythmic strobe of the sonar as it identifies the creature still a few yards too deep into the black to see. 

 

After it doesn’t move for several minutes, Lena gets the peculiar idea that she’s being watched by whatever it is keeping out of sight. She glances from the sonar to the code waiting for her input on the screen. The creature stays in place a good twenty feet away. 

 

Lena doesn’t have time to figure out what it is. The sooner she disables Lex’s transmitter panel, the sooner she can get out there and leave behind whatever weird-ass fish sits around and....  _ watches  _ people. 

 

The code that Lex uses doesn’t surprise her, but it annoys her incredibly. He’s hidden clues throughout it, requiring her to sit and decipher one before she can get to the next and so forth. She can tell he meant to draw out her air as long as possible; Lena re-doubles her efforts until her fingers are nearly flying across the tiny screen, cramped by the space that was meant for just her upper body. She hisses answers to herself under her breath as if the mere sound of them might pin a sticky note to the inside of her suit, and then re-traces each step thrice over to confirm. 

 

In the entire forty minutes it takes Lena to discover the extent of her brother’s labyrinth, the creature remains floating right where it is. 

 

“Well,” Lena says, bright with self satisfaction as she undos the security parameters of the control panel, “so much for that.” Some of the glow within the circuits begins to die, and Lena counts the seconds in her head before yanking clean one of the cords in the side of the panel. It releases with a snap and a tiny spark before the rest of the electricity fades out. 

 

Lena takes a long, relieved breath. 

 

The control panel explodes. 

 

\---

 

She doesn’t register it at first. 

 

One minute, Lena is relaxing in the ADS as the power to Lex’s control panel dies, and the next something of impossible force slams into the chest of her suit and throws her backward. She doesn’t even have time to scream or flail; she barely even sees the flash of the explosion before the cacophonous blast erupts in a massive column of silt and stone. 

 

The thruster pack on her backside smashes into the sea floor. Pain shoots up her spine and down her arms to her very fingertips. The back of her skull connects to the acrylic behind her. Stars sparkle throughout her vision, dizzying and disorienting. 

 

Lena takes a ragged gasp for air. Alarms are shrieking at various intervals within the suit, and distantly she recognizes that the sonar has broken. Blood leaks from...somewhere, smearing across the inside of her helmet. Her feet and hands feel wet and cold. 

 

She lurches onto her side, blindly reaching for something to right herself with. Her breath is harsh and shallow, and she can barely see anything-- the outside world is still enveloped by sand and something dark is dripping into her eyes-- but she knows if she doesn’t get herself back to the surface soon, there would be nothing anyone could do to save her before the life support functions of the suit failed completely. 

 

Lena shifts the suit and leans onto the rock to steady herself. The LED lights of her helmet are still emitting, but all it does is cast a fuzzy glow on the water around her, and one of them flickers a few times before giving out completely. Shaking, Lena grabs for the thruster switch. 

 

At first, nothing happens; then, after some furious toggling, the thrusters suddenly engage, pushing her off her feet and forward. 

 

Then they stop. 

 

And Lena falls.

 

And falls. 

 

The suit spirals, unable to engage the pack any longer. Her helmet strikes something hard, and Lena realizes that she’s tipped over the edge of the canyon and is free-falling beyond any sort of barrier to keep her from descending into nothingness. 

 

The suit jerks. Lena grunts and peers up through the acrylic; a dark line has formed overhead, and belatedly she recognizes the massive crack as it slowly spider-webs further through the glass. 

 

There’s something else. Lena blinks, still dazed, as the light from her helmet catches on something moving through the clouded water. It glints a deep blue-- or was it red?-- like the iridescent scales of a fish. 

 

Lena sees the hand clutching to the ADS’s manipulator arm before she realizes the suit is no longer descending into the void. Sediment still rolls through everything around her, but somehow, she sees the arm attached to the hand, then the shoulder, and the body, and the...hair?

 

A sharp spike of pain ricochets through her head. 

 

She must have been knocked unconscious, or hallucinating from the impact. Or maybe she was already dead. Or maybe Lex just had this sick of a sense of humor, and had built some sort of fucked-up robot to fetch the remains of his sister from the depths of her ocean grave. 

 

There was no other explanation as to why Lena Luthor was witnessing a mermaid holding to the arm of the ADS and hauling her out of the submarine canyon. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised (at least, I promised myself) that I would show the mermaid in the second chapter, but as you can see it took me a long while to actually get there. But I promise you actually get to see her next chapter! 
> 
> And yes, all of my science is fake. :D


End file.
